rainbowmagicfandomcom-20200213-history
User blog:LexsJB/The Rise and Fall (and rise?) of Rainbow Magic
Hi everyone This isn't a blog I'm going to spend much effort on, but I just felt as if I needed to share this with you. If you've got other things to do (revision, outings, dates), don't waste time reading this. Storytime with Lex Yesterday whilst in the local shopping centre (looking for CDs, btw), we made a quick pit stop in Waterstones (kinda glad that there's still one that exists near us). For those across the pond, Waterstones is/was a great bookshop chain that's on the edge of being extinct like many other great shops (like Blockbuster and Borders and Woolworths. Sorry, going off topic). Whilst I waited for my friend, I went to check out the Rainbow Magic books on sale. The first Waterstones shut down a few years ago, and they had a whole revolving shelf dedicated to Rainbow Magic books but this is what's left when it reopened. So wanting to find out more for the sake of a new blog, I told my friend to meet me in another book store (WH Smith) so then I could check out their stock of RM books. Looking at these stocks and how big they used to be made me wonder: is Rainbow Magic becoming less popular? I've always had my own opinions on which series were the most popular. The first few being very popular, the middle ones (namely Magical Animal Fairies (sorry)) being least popular, and the newest ones gaining a bit more attention. But let's see if it actually is like that. Statistics Looking at the results on Google Trend, we can see a huge peak in 2006-2007. In the UK, this was when the Pet Keeper Fairies, Fun Day Fairies, Petal Fairies and Dance Fairies were published. However, 2006 was the time when Rainbow Magic came to the USA, so that would also help boost the number of searches. It's pretty obvious that the public's favourite is the Rainbow Fairies, or first few series at least, but bear in mind that during their time, computers and Internet weren't used as much. There was a dip in the search results in 2009-2010. That was the year of the Magical Animal Fairies, Green Fairies, Ocean Fairies and the Twilight Fairies. The summer of 2011 was a good season for the series. That's where it had another major peak, with the books published at the time being Kate the Royal Wedding Fairy (first book written for a royal occasion)' Princess Fairies and the Showtime Fairies'. For me, their popularity is pretty unexpected but that's probably because I've never touched those series ever. And sadly, it goes downhill from there. Due to the more constant use of the Internet to buy things, I'd expect search results to go up. Unless most people use anything other than Google (my laptop is preset to Bing for some reason), i hate to say that Rainbow Magic isn't as popular as it used to be, even with the fancy new layout and The Great 'Rainbow Magic Reading Challenge' that kids are pushed to participate in every time they turn a page in the book. I just hope that the reason for this downfall is that parents are getting kids back into the 00s where we'd just go to a bookshop or library and simply get a fairy book. I think the decision to include Tiana from Toys AndMe was a smart move, due to her popularity and her books becoming 'best-sellers' on Amazon. They might just be raising the popularity of the books once more. However, this is just my interpretation. What do you think? What's the stock of RM books in your local bookshop like? Final words? I dream of finding a shop with every single RM book on sale, a whole section of the shop dedicated to them! But that probably won't happen in my area in one of the forgotten Home Counties that nothing important happens in. This was probably a useless blog for everyone's IQ, but I felt as if I needed to share this because it would be weird to just post a picture of a book shelf and say "wow. Look. Waterstone's skint on RM books" or "wow. A weird publication of Destiny the Pop Star Fairy. Fascinating". Oh wait a minute, that brings me to talk about... More irrelevance. In WH Smith, I found a book for Destiny the Pop Star Fairy in the new style but when I looked inside it, it was in an Early Reader format, with giant words and simplified sentences, yet, nowhere does it say "Early Reader" on the front. A bit weird, but it's probably some one-off format for that McDonald's offer on the corner. Also, I found a picture from the Internet and there's a picture of a stack of books where you can slightly see a bit of Heidi the Vet Fairy in the new US format. It's pretty weird, since I spent quite a lot of time trying to find the US Heidi on sale anywhere, but it's not there. And that means there may be many other "UK-only" books released in the US where they aren't on Amazon, our main source of RM news. Just a thought. If you stuck through this, thanks for reading! LexsJBTalk 12:14, May 30, 2017 (UTC) PS: just because the search results for the series fall or rise during a fairy's publication time doesn't mean that they are forever unpopular. I'm just adding that info in in case someone wanted to know what was happening in the series at the time. PPS: Also, the series is more searched in New Zealand than Australia, UK or US. Wow! Category:Blog posts